Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  “Huh?”

  Skyler had woken up with a resolution in his mind, fragile but fully formed. He could no longer afford to hang around in a paralysis of indecision. The loss of the Victory had proved just how quickly the end could come. There was no time to lose.

  By hook or by crook he talked Hriklif into coming with him. “We shouldn’t leave the reactor unattended,” Hriklif objected.

  “No, and we won’t.”

  They flew up into the storage module. Rriksti were at work, extracting heavy metals from scrap in the alchemical-looking setup they had cobbled together at the machine shop bench.

  “Guys, could a couple of you cover for us? Just hang out in the engineering module. Don’t touch anything. If any alerts go off, ping me.”

  Skyler and Hriklif donned their spacesuits and squeezed into the airlock.

  “We’re going to get in such trouble,” Hriklif moaned.

  “Ditchlight,” Skyler said, using the English translation of the engineer’s name, “here’s some perspective for you. We are all at risk of dying. Screw the rules.”

  *

  The two rriksti Skyler had asked to cover for them settled into the engineering module. They eyed the Monopoly pieces floating around. Presently they tried biting them, but spat them out. Only aluminum. Not nutritious.

  Further aft, in the turbine room, the drive turbine and the housekeeping turbine thundered in their steel cabinets.

  Skyler and Hriklif rarely went back there. Neither of them had noticed the rectangular hole, about the size of a hardback book, that had recently appeared in the back of the housekeeping turbine cabinet. It was easy to miss. A screen the same dull green as the cabinet covered it.

  The screen was a solar cell. It soaked up the bright light in the turbine room to charge a capacitor on the drone that had made the hole, which was now squatting inside the cabinet.

  Equipped to maneuver in zero-gee with gentle puffs of air, the drone had a miniature laser drill.

  Over the last three days, since Koichi Masuoka released it in the engineering module, it had drilled a little ring of pits around the pipe supplying hot steam to the housekeeping turbine.

  This task completed, it had gone into standby mode.

  Now, Koichi, sitting in the main hab under Linda’s eagle-eyed gaze, punched another command into his wristwatch.

  The watch transmitted the command wirelessly to the drone.

  The drone began to perform the last task programmed into it by the NXC.

  It fired more laser pulses at one of the pits on the pipe.

  Hitting the same spot over and over.

  Weakening the metal.

  Again, and again.

  *

  Skyler led the way through the Cloudeater’s passenger cabin. For once there weren’t many people in hospital. Enough heavy metals had been cannibalized from the Victory’s electronics to give the malnutrition cases a new lease on life. Cleanmay, the rriksti doctor, greeted them amiably.

  They flew into the darkness of the crew area.

  Hriklif gripped Skyler’s arm, dragging his feet along the sides of the corridor to brake.

  Skyler edged forward until he could peek into the cockpit. Keelraiser slumped in his seat. He seemed to be absorbed in his screens.

  Skyler gave Hriklif a thumbs-up. They backtracked to the computer room and shut themselves in.

  Hriklif threw his head back and rolled his shoulders—this is crazy!—but he set up the comms program they had caught Keelraiser using before. Soon Skyler was staring at a blank screen.

  He now realized that he hadn’t planned out what to say.

  “Hey, Hannah. This is Skyler,” he whispered. Hriklif had to do the typing. Keelraiser had rigged some kind of conversion program to turn rriksti squiggles into English. “I just wanted to get in touch …” Stupid, stupid. “I love you,” he whispered.

  Hriklif opened his mouth; his hair danced.

  “Just type it! I love you. I should have told you years ago. I was such a loser back then. I hope I’ve changed since then, for the better, hopefully. But my feelings haven’t changed. I love you, I love you.”

  As he spoke, he ceased to see the slim, snarky beauty who hosted the Hannah Ginsburg Show. He saw his Hannah, a touch overweight, unaware of how damn sexy she was. He remembered her grin, her acerbic streak, and her awesome professional competence.

  He blurted, “I don’t know what Keelraiser’s been telling you. Just between you and me, he’s a complete douche. But this is me, Skyler. Remember? The guy with the peace symbol and the bad hair. When I climbed into the Shenzhou, back in Europa orbit, I never thought it would be the last time I saw you …” His emotions untwisted like a long-coiled spring. “I’m on the Cloudeater right now. That’s the shuttle the good guys took down to the surface of Europa. It’s kinda like a space 747. Um, it smells like rotting seaweed and it’s hot as hell—”

  “It is not hot,” Hriklif said. “It’s nice.”

  “OK, my buddy Hriklif is saying it doesn’t feel hot to him. Aliens gotta alien, right? Anyway, I hope you’re more comfortable where you are. I wish I was there. I wish you were here. I’d do anything to see you again …”

  “Why not just propose to her?” Hriklif said, laughing with his hair.

  The reference to human marital customs surprised Skyler. “Do you guys do marriage?”

  “Nope. We used to, maybe a couple of centuries ago? But I don’t think the Temple allows it now.”

  “Huh. Well, a lot of people on Earth don’t do marriage anymore, either.”

  “So do you want to say anything else?”

  Skyler hesitated, second-guessing himself. A love-email would not save Hannah… or him. They were locked into a deadly dance determined by orbital mechanics and the ranges of the two ships’ guns.

  “Just this. I have total faith in you, Hannah. I know you’ll do the right thing. Send it,” he said, before he could change his mind.

  “Done,” Hriklif said.

  “What did you just do?” Keelraiser said, in the doorway.

  Hriklif and Skyler cringed.

  “Ah, you’ve emailed Hannah. Let me see what you’ve put.” Keelraiser floated past them. “‘I love you, I love you.’” He opened his mouth at Skyler, just as Hriklif had done. The rriksti invariably seemed to react to the subject of love with derisive amusement. “What on earth were you trying to accomplish?”

  “I just wanted to tell her how I feel,” Skyler said. His lips felt stiff. He was afraid of Keelraiser.

  “How very self-indulgent of you,” Keelraiser said. “Well, she won’t read it.”

  At that moment, the comms screen changed from dark brown to medium brown. A single, dim word appeared.

  Skyler???

  “She read it!” Skyler crowed. “Hriklif, can you reply? Tell her—”

  A second reply popped up.

  That’s not very fucking funny, Iristigut. Skyler Taft is DEAD, and you will be, too, when I get my hands on you.

  Skyler recoiled from the screen. “She thinks it’s you pretending to be me.”

  “She thinks the SoD never left Europa,” Keelraiser said.

  “You lied to her as well as to us? You really are a douche.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Keelraiser said. He pushed Hriklif away from the comms console. Urgently, he started typing.

  “What are you telling her?” Skyler yelped.

  “At least she’s checking her email now,” Keelraiser muttered. Skyler had never seen anyone type so fast, apart from a few ex-hacker dudes he had known at the NXC.

  Hriklif floated towards the door.

  “I’m not finished with you, Hriklif,” Keelraiser said without looking around.

  “Too bad. I’m finished with you,” Hriklif yelped. “You think rules were made to be broken, but if anyone else breaks the rules, watch out! What happened to our revolution? The guy just wants to tell his girlfriend he loves her, and you cut him to pieces. It’s almost like you’re a Krijistal offic
er or something! Fuck you, asshole.” Hriklif darted away down the corridor.

  Skyler, horrified and confused, stayed put. As much as he wanted to follow Hriklif and ask him what he was talking about—a revolution?—he wanted more urgently to see what Keelraiser was typing. Was he lying to Hannah about Skyler? Telling her that Skyler was dead, after all?

  He edged around the computer room, behind Keelraiser’s back. If only rriksti screens weren’t so damn hard to read! He glimpsed a few words: and, the, you, if, dirigibles—

  Keelraiser still had not looked around. He seemed to be unaware Skyler was still there. But unbeknownst to Skyler, as soon as he could see the screen, it also caught his reflection.

  Keelraiser took one hand off the keyboard and backhanded him across the room.

  CHAPTER 48

  Tap tap with the laser on that little pit in the steam supply pipe. Tap tap, over and over … until it gave way.

  The pipe cracked under the pressure of the superheated steam within.

  The steam jet slammed the drone against the side of the cabinet, crushing it.

  Seconds later, the cabinet itself exploded.

  The steam filled the turbine room and boiled into the engineering module. It came straight from the reactor, at a temperature of 500° Celsius. It killed the two rriksti there instantly.

  On swept the wave of superheated death. Seven rriksti perished in the storage module, as scalding clouds of steam filled their lungs and boiled them alive.

  Three seconds after the pipe blew, the housekeeping turbine’s safety interlocks shut it down. However, there was still plenty of water in the steam drum. The secondary heat exchanger continued to relentlessly vaporize it. More steam boiled through Engineering and the storage module, and gushed into SLS.

  The only person there was Giles.

  He was unclogging the settling tanks. He had taken to wearing his rriksti spacesuit for this task. Yes, it looked eccentric. But it blocked out the smell. It also brought him closer in spirit to Brbb and the other Krijistal who had died on the Victory. And it served as a barrier between himself and the other humans, so that no one would say, “Turn that frown upside down,” or “Cheer up, the world’s not ending until next Tuesday,” or, worst of all, “Want to talk about it?” No, Giles did not want to talk about it. He didn’t want to tell anyone how the Krijistal’s sacrifice had desolated him. What they had shared … what was it? Merely sex, you might say, from the human point of view. Weekend jollies, from the rriksti point of view. But it was more than that. They had accepted him. Among them, he had the right number of fingers and toes, and his paunchy little body was no more laughable than any other human’s.

  He wept a little, steaming up his goggles.

  When the module filled with steam, he mistook it for grief clouding his vision.

  Jack screamed over the radio, “Explosion in the turbine room! Close the pressure doors, close the fucking doors!”

  *

  Jack groaned, stuck on the bridge, watching clouds of steam billow through the main hab. Within seconds, it obscured the cameras, blinding him. “Alexei! Skyler! Giles! Check in!”

  Close the fucking doors, he’d said. But when the SoD was on its way to Europa, the first HERF attack from the rriksti had triggered the sensors that automatically closed all the pressure doors. Xiang Peixun, their original life support specialist, had died that day—literally cut in half by a closing door. After that they’d disabled autoclose on all the pressure doors. And disabled they remained, from that day to this.

  Someone would have to go into that hell and close the doors manually.

  “Copy,” Giles said, hoarsely. “I go to close the door of the turbine room.”

  “Where are you?”

  “SLS. It’s filled with steam. Now I go aft. We find out how good these rriksti suits really are.”

  He’s in his suit?!? Why?

  Jack didn’t have long to wonder about it. The first wisps of steam licked into the bridge. It smelled like hot oil.

  Jesus, I’d better put my suit on.

  He could not close the door of the bridge as long as the other guys were still out there.

  He grabbed his suit off the aft wall, shucked his shorts, slipped his arms through the straps and performed the writhing trick he had learned to reach the donning button. The silky smart material flowed up over his body. He gulped a last mouthful of tea from his squeeze bottle before the suit covered his face.

  Linda flopped onto the bridge, followed by Koichi.

  “Spare suits over there,” Jack said, relaying his headset’s transmitter through the intercom. “Get into them.”

  Instead, Linda started to crank the pressure door closed, and Koichi leapt on Jack with desperate ferocity. A karate-style punch that would have felled Jack in gravity instead sent him spinning across the bridge, gasping and coughing into his air supply mouthpiece. He bounced off the far wall, reflexively putting his dukes up. But Koichi was not a rriksti. He had learned his unarmed combat skills in the Japan Self-Defense Force. He knocked Jack’s fists aside, grabbed the back of the right seat to stabilize himself, and pistoned a kick into Jack’s solar plexus. Winded, Jack helplessly gasped for air. Linda struggled with the crank, while Koichi searched the lockers, probably looking for something to kill Jack with.

  Jesus! I trusted him! Jack thought in disbelief.

  More steam billowed through the crack in the door, and Alexei came with it, a shadow in the white clouds now filling the bridge. Unaware of what was going on, he grabbed spare suits from the aft wall and tossed one each at Linda and Koichi, then hastily donned his own.

  Jack hauled breath into his lungs. “Watch out Alexei, these fuckers attacked me—”

  “We just don’t want to die,” Koichi said.

  “If you don’t want to die, put the damn suits on!” Alexei yelled. The steam was now so dense that they could scarcely see each other. The LEDs on the consoles lit up the fog. Koichi and Linda, choking, donned the suits.

  Jack knew how scary it was your first time. He waited until the smart material flowed over their faces, and then he went for Koichi. He wrapped his legs around his old friend and punched him in the face, Krijistal style. He had never done this to a fellow human. It horrified him a bit when he felt Koichi’s nose break.

  “Alexei!” Linda shrieked. “Make him stop! We’ve still got a chance to survive! We go into orbit around the moon, OK? The Lightbringer flies off into outer space. They cannot aerobrake, it’s impossible. But we have a working drive. So we go into lunar orbit, then CELL sends up a landing shuttle—”

  “Yeah …” Alexei said slowly, and Jack froze. He forgot about Koichi even while the Japanese man bucked under him, choking on his own blood. He realized he was about to lose Alexei. The Russian had made a number of offhand comments about Camp Eternal Light, implying it actually might not be a bad plan to take refuge there … He wanted to live, of course he did. With Nene.

  “Nyet.” Decisively, Alexei shook his head. “If it’s just us? Yeah, maybe. But it is not just us. It’s three hundred other people, including my girlfriend. Probably you have killed them all, but anyway, I have no time for this stupid conversation. If any of them are still alive …”

  He headed for the keel tube, then paused.

  “Jack, you can handle these svolochi, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  As Alexei left the bridge, Jack’s paralysis melted. He kicked Koichi away and dived for the lockers. He kept his guns in several different hiding-places now. He snatched his blaster out of the first-aid locker and levelled it two-handed at the ghosts in the fog. “Did you do this?”

  The possibility had not occurred to him before Alexei stated it as a matter of fact. Now it seemed both self-evident, and unthinkable.

  “Are you going to kill us if we say yes?” Linda said. “Or are you going to kill us anyway?”

  Jack’s gloved fingers twitched on the trigger. He pictured the mess they would make. Just like Kate, when the Krijistal
shot her, right here on this very bridge.

  He had changed a lot, but he could not face the thought that he’d changed into a Krijistal.

  “Just get out!” he roared. “Get the fuck off my bridge, and count yourselves lucky I’m not asking for the suits back.”

  He closed the pressure door behind them and lunged through the steam for the intercom. Thank God it was still working. “Skyler, Skyler, come in.”

  Skyler would’ve been in the engineering module. Right in the path of the steam explosion.

  Terror gripped Jack. He’d never consciously realized how much he valued the young ex-spook.

  *

  Giles dropped through the clouds of steam into the engineering module. He couldn’t see a thing. When he landed on the aft wall, a body rolled limply under his foot, dropping him onto a second body.

  “Everyone is dead back here, Jack.”

  “Skyler?”

  “I have not found him yet.”

  Giles eased down the keel tube into the turbine room. Fresh steam surged up around him. His rriksti suit had no heads-up display, but he estimated that he was moving through lethal hundred-degree temperatures. What’s worse, he knew the steam had to be radioactive. Fear drove him back. Laboriously dragging the bodies, he retreated to the storage module.

  “I am closing the door now.” Seven-toed feet braced on the wall, he rotated the crank with his seven-fingered hands. They were strong and deft.

  “Let me know when you’re done,” Jack said. “I’m going to vent the atmosphere in Engineering.”

  Alexei came on the radio. “I’m in the main hab. It is filled with steam, but the air is still breathable. People are alive.”

  “Thank God,” Jack said. “Thank God.”

  The door of the engineering module squelched closed. The steam in the storage module thinned. A dozen lifeless bodies bumped over the aft wall. Rage suffused Giles. To make it all this way, and then die like this … “There is no God!” he shouted. “I knew it all along, but now I believe it.”

  *

  As soon as Giles got the door closed, Jack vented the atmosphere from the engineering module and turbine room. Every module had spill valves, in case of fire. He took a few seconds to update Keelraiser. “The only thing is we haven’t found Skyler,” he finished, the words heavy with dread.